The over 4m of cummulative snow that fell on my home this past winter had me bracing for an epicly soggy spring. The only problem was that spring never really happened - we've skipped it and gone straight to summer. It's shorts-and-straw hat weather with the last vestigages of snowbanks audiably sizzling away under a hot sun. Water levels are ( Read more... )

Finally got out into the back yard for the first time this spring. The startings have not only been getting into my kitchen vent (top of the 2nd story), they've totally torn off the flaps and left a gaping hole in the back of my house!! Needless to say there will be no more birdfeeders.

*starts looking for a repairman*

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I've come to the conclusion today that I'm burnt out from the round-after-round of staff cuts (next axe falls in May althought the shuffling of departments has already begun). I was sitting in my cubical staring at collection of half-finished projects scattered across my todo list, realizing that I never finish anything any more, I just work on it ( Read more... )

American politics is a strange process, full of some of the lowest lows and highest highs of any democracy. As an outsider, it is often easy to feel the sting of barbs aimed at the world beyond their borders or the naive narrowsightness of their words. But occassionally they do transcend, do live up to the dream they strive to be. I'm uncertain ( Read more... )

Dear collapsing investment banks,

On behalf of all the cockroaches still living in the dot.com ground zero rubble, allow me to say:

HA-HA!

Sincerely(*), Bitterwind ( Read more... )

I really need to stock up on emergency supplies. I like to keep my cupboard close to empty to reduce unneeded snacking and although I'm not out of food, I did start to suffer cola withdrawl so I decided to take a walk to the grocery store. That expedition didn't last long as there are up to 2-3 feet of snow covering the sidewalks and a lane of ( Read more... )

The politics of the "Obama memo" are starting to tumble out of control. It is now not impossible that our Federal government will fall because of clumsy accidental meddle in the American presidental primaries ( Read more... )

I cannot begin to say how deeply Gary Gygax has influenced my life. My shelves and walls and disks and memories are filled with the results of the bridge between novels of fantasy and the imagination of an aging child built by those who worked and played with him in the creation of D&D. Role playing games are truly one of the great ideas of the ( Read more... )

( spoilers on the unsolved quotes )